Any Given Sunday

This movie came out in 1999 and for the next seven years or so (middle school and high school, for me) it always seemed to come up every now and again when my friends and classmates would discuss football, movies, and especially football movie. So when I saw it on a $5 bargain shelf recently, I figured I had to find out some ten years later what all the fuss was about. And let's just say the lesson, as always, is not to take film recommendations from teenagers. Now, this wasn't a terrible movie. It wasn't even bad. But it was hardly a movie at all in the sense that a movie has a plot. This felt much more like a mesh between a documentary and a highlight reel - but not in a clever or creative way, make no mistake. The movie followed the Miami Sharks (a fictional professional football team) both on and off the field for the final five games of their season. Players get injured. Rookies pay their dues. The coach and the owner squabble. There's plenty of in-fighting among the lazy veterans and the energy-filled young guys. Wives and girlfriends get cheated on. Drugs are done. There are quite a few penises on display in several locker room scenes. And aside from a brief inspirational speech toward the end of the movie from head coach Al Pacino, nothing ever feels dramatic or meaningful in any larger scheme at all. Instead, this movie brings intensity. There must have been close to a hundred "hard football hits" depicted on screen and a dozen more off-field punches thrown. There's music playing at almost all times. Sometimes it's hip hop and sometimes it's rock, but at all times it's hard and heavy and fast and loud. So at the end of the 150 minute run time - way too long, by the way - the movie had all felt somewhat more like a never-ending artistic mash-up of music and football clips than it felt like a tale with a cohesive plot and appropriate amounts of time spent on rising and falling action. But again, this wasn't a bad movie. The acting was pretty great and the characters were surprisingly well developed for the little amount of background information we're given on each of them. Even the cinematography was well done. I just didn't care so much for the overall story because there really wasn't one. I had the same issue with the last Oliver Stone movie I watched, The Doors. That movie had a great soundtrack and decent acting, but was really just two and a half hours of Jim Morrison being a drugged out asshole. And this movie had an intense soundtrack and some solid acting, but was really just football players getting hit really hard on the field and doing cocaine off of naked hookers during their free time. It certainly depicted a fictionalized version of professional football in which everything that is done is done ridiculously hard, be it tackling or partying or arguing in the locker room. Like, at one point a player gets hit so hard that his eye pops out. What? And that brings me to my final point. Going into this 1999 movie, I expected it to be dated in some ways. And it was. But not in the ways I had anticipated. Today, there's such an emphasis on player safety. Even several years ago, quarterbacks and receivers were being protected from late hits and unnecessary roughness. But the 1999 football depicted in the movie is such bush league bone-crushing bullshit filled with late hits, helmet on helmet hits, and absurd amounts of post-whistle roughness. I know it's a movie, and I know movies need to play up things like violence and animosity. But without even trying to count them, I saw all kinds of late hits and hard hits throughout the movie that would warrant at least a flag - and probably a one-game suspension these days - but very rarely saw the refs calling any penalties. It's almost as if the film is a parody of the violence surrounding the culture of professional football. But it isn't. It's just an honest but slightly misguided attempt at making an enduring and compelling sports movie. No thanks. Give me even the worst three episodes of Friday Night Lights instead.